-- Download How to Help Raise Hope, On A Monday Morning! as PDF --

Beverly Bell just posted an amazing, inspiring interview with Gerardo Cerdas at Raising Hope Across the Borders: Transnational Social Movements and Power

Gerardo Cerdas is coordinator of the Latin American- and Caribbean-wide social movement Grito de los Excluidos, Cry of the Excluded. He is also a sociologist and researcher. A native of Costa Rica, Cerdas lives in Brazil.

I often question the value of raising hope. Are we punishing people with false hopes that end up leading to little improvement in society?

The neoliberals want to beat us into compliant, consumerist submission. So I refuse to give in to that cynicism.

But still, it is hard to see hope.

Until pieces like this, that help us understand the long game, and how we’re all in this together.

One of the most powerful parts of this interview, for me, is here. Let it wash over you. Then read the rest to start the week of right!

Q: Gerardo, when you said “raise peoples’ hopes,” what did you mean by that?

I meant to really believe that transformation is possible. We are in a very tight spot – we’re screwed, you could say. There’s a great deal of poverty, a lot of exclusion, a lot of violence, a lot of injustice in our countries. Working people and our natural resources are being terribly exploited. We’re up against a huge monster, an economic, political machine of monstrous proportions. It would be very easy for us to lose hope, to lose heart, to just give up the struggle entirely and say “To hell with it. There’s no way we can overcome these massive forces, so let’s just go about our lives and forget about it.”

But we know that if we’re here today, it’s because our grandparents, our ancestors, didn’t give up the fight. They raised our hopes.

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Stephen Elliott-Buckley

Post-partisan eco-socialist. at Politics, Re-Spun

Stephen Elliott-Buckley is a husband, father, professor, speaker, consultant, former suburban Vancouver high school English and Social Studies teacher who changed careers because the BC Liberal Party has been working hard to ruin public education. He has various English and Political Science degrees and has been writing political, social and economic editorials since November 2002. Stephen is in Twitter, Miro and iTunes, and the email thing, and at his website, dgiVista.org.

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